Shiki Restaurant Brookline

Shiki - Japanese food that lives up to its reputation9 Babcock StreetBrookline, MA 02446Tel. 617-738-0200

If you look to the right and down as you walk onto Babcock Street from Harvard Street in Brookline’s Coolidge Corner, you will very soon discover a below-street level establishment called Shiki. You will also discover it if you are looking up, because there is an extra sign.

Owing to the success of a previous visit to Shiki, we returned with out-of-town visitors who live in the sticks and want to make their visits to city restaurants worthwhile. They are also vegetarians.

Happily, Shiki again lived up to its word as being a purveyor of “Fine Japanese Cuisine.” The interior is softly lit and soothing, with warm colors and clean lines – in short, the atmosphere that makes it pleasant to be in a good Japanese restaurant.

As our visitors thrive on small servings of food (they are a rebuke to the rest of us), and some of our choices were the same as theirs, our selections don’t begin to represent what is offered on the menu.

Our dishes included seaweed salad, avocado salad with snow crab, broiled eggplant, and Yu Dofu (tofu and vegetables in broth). One order of tender cubed beef steak was split between the four non-vegetarians, allowing us the pleasure and protein hit of red meat with a manageable amount of guilt.

While there wasn’t a dish that anyone didn’t think enjoyable, the stand-out favorites of the evening were the avocado salad, Yu Dofu, caterpillar roll, and rainbow roll (though all the rolls were delicious).